The British National Party is expanding its influence through a series of organisations that disguise their link with the far right. Aware that fewer than one in four voters turns out at local elections, the party has embarked on a new strategy to win support for its extremist views.

The BNP, which now has 19 councillors, claims to be fielding 600 candidates at next month's town hall polls - almost double the number four years ago - fighting on an 'anti-Islam' ticket and seeking gains in east London and Birmingham.

But its senior hierarchy believes it needs new ways to spread its message in local communities outside election times. The Observer has learnt that top BNP activists are behind the launch of the Christian Council of Britain, a new religious movement which will campaign against the rise of multiculturalism.

Robert West, the council's liaison officer, denies it is a BNP front. It was 'more a layman's movement' West said. 'There's discontent about the direction in which the church and the country is going. There's a feeling minorities and "isms" contrary to Christianity are favoured.'

But The Observer understands that Clive Potter, a leading BNP member who was expelled from the Unison trade union for far-right activities, is to be its president. Also helping to establish the council is Steve Blake, a leading BNP member in Scotland. Blake, an IT entrepreneur and the BNP webmaster, is setting up the council website. In the 1980s, his company, Aurora Promotions, imported Nazi propaganda from the US.

Potter has also helped to set up Solidarity, a putative trade union, which wants to raise funds for the BNP. The union aims to 'protect, assist and promote the working and living conditions of the citizens of the British Isles', according to documents lodged with the certification office, the official union regulator.

The BNP is also linked to a new 'civil rights' pressure group set up to monitor anti-white racism. 'Civil Liberty is an independent, non-political organisation autonomous of any political party in Britain,' the pressure group maintains.

Among its core goals are the creation of a fund to train lawyers to fight for 'white rights'. It issues supporters with cameras and mobile phones to collect evidence of threats to 'indigenous Britons'. Its founder, Kevin Scott, is the BNP chief north-east England organiser, who has convictions for assault and threatening behaviour.

The BNP's new tactics owe much to the influence on its chairman, Nick Griffin, of Roberto Fiore, an Italian neo-fascist who fled to Britain after police sought to question him in connection with his membership of a far-right group blamed for the 1980 bombing of Bologna train station which left 85 people dead and 200 wounded. Fiore became an ally of Griffin and they stayed close after Fiore went home.

'Fiore has built a range of broad-based alliances,' said Gerry Gable of anti-fascist organisation Searchlight. 'He's targeted not only the football hooligans but those on the picket lines.

Griffin has also learnt from the example of Don Black, a former Ku Klux Klansman who heads Stormfront, the US-based white supremacy movement that has sought a broad national alliance with far-right groups across America. Black served three years in prison for trying to invade Dominica in 1981 to establish a white supremacist state there. His Stormfront website boasts an online radio station, a shop and a whites-only dating service.

Earlier this year Griffin joined Black at the American Renaissance conference, a US far-right jamboree in Herndon, Virginia. 'We have had enough of this ghastly multiracial experiment forced on us,' Griffin told the conference. He warned: 'People are going to be killed before we de-Islamify Europe.'

Phil Edwards, the BNP press officer, conceded his party was keen to support other far-right organisations. 'We're finding there's a lot of disillusionment with a number of established institutions,' he said.

Gable sees it differently. 'Griffin's saying, "If we can't achieve anything in the parliamentary sense, we'll achieve it in another way, by going into communities in other ways; it's far easier than fighting elections."'